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From the journal...

"Jonathan Meese, 'art's ant,' fullfils his purpose, his purpose in the service or Art. Art created everything, all gods are most loving ideologies of Art. Art is not a religion, but every religion is Art. Everything that is religious most lovingly ends up in the Museum, great, great, great. Jonathan Meese believes in everything. Every god is a mandate of Art. Art is not a god, but all gods can play with each other in the Dictatorship Of Art. Art is absolute protection. The Dictatorship Of Art is an eternal time of revolution. When the Dictatorship Of Art reigns, a new era begins: Everything will play. Art does not produce victims and martyrdom. (Great.)"

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“And so, dear Stefano, I will give you guns. And I will teach you to play extremely complicated wars, where the truth will never be entirely on one side. You will release a lot of energy in your young years, and your ideas may be a bit confused, but slowly you will develop some convictions. Then, when you are grown up, you will believe that it was all a fairy tale: little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, the guns, the cannons, single combat, the witch and the seven dwarfs, armies against armies. But if by chance, when you are grown up, the monstrous characters of your childish dreams persist, witches, trolls, armies, bombs, compulsory military service, perhaps, having gained a critical attitude toward fairy tales, you will learn to live and criticize reality.”

[Text from Misreadings. More about Eco's Diario Minimo here.]

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As a melomano at heart, I consider Héctor Lavoe’s biopic "El Cantante" one of the biggest tragedies of this year that is about to end. Probably devised as a vehicle to showcase its celebrities, the film stayed at the most superficial level possible, ratifying sad Latino stereotypes and failing to address a social context that is impossible to detach from Lavoe’s career.

Paraphrasing César Miguel Rondón, born in New York, Salsa was spontaneously adopted in barrios all over Latin America in a process driven by folks [as opposed to record labels] who could very well identify with the experience of New York City’s Latin communities. At the center of it and unifying feelings across the region was a mix of violence and poverty as well as a huge need for real media representation. As you can imagine it was a bit difficult for the typical Latino to identify himself with the Rolling Stones or with the bad guy on TV.

Beyond its quality and a great deal of innovation, it was consistency with daily life the defining factor that turned Salsa into a regional phenomenon on its way to achieve global importance. The music in its most pure form is still part of the most eclectic environments: From the Paris neighborhood bar to big bands in Japan. Let’s hope that its history doesn’t get lost in translation, it should be as essential to the music as the music itself.

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I wrote about OutMigration last July in the context of a post about Dinner Theater, or better said, a modern remediation of the art form. Fortunately for us in New York the folks of Monkey Town, Accidental Movement, and Brooklyn-based art direction powerhouse Mogollon , decided to join forces again and put together version 2.0 of the show. Like the original, OutMigration promises a 360-degree stimulation of our senses in one of those experiences that still feels ahead of its time.

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As discussed in a previous post, Bruce Mau and the Institute without Boundaries’ Massive Change proposes to filter culture through the eyes of design in an effort to apply the transformational techniques and overall problem-solving philosophy of the discipline everywhere. Design transcends design itself, augmenting “human possibility” while reducing “complexity.”

Communications as part of the broader system of Information Economies, offers an interesting area of analysis when it comes to the application of the fundamental thinking and philosophy of design to the process of planning communications programs.

Modern society certainly demands better communication, businesses and other organizations crave great communication ideas as an essential part of their very existence (corporate, brand, etc), the media establishment is intensively reinventing itself around new communications systems that include people in their new role as active participants, new media outlets experiment with their own systems as the balance of power is shifting in favor of the stronger idea as opposed to just capital… the list of actors can go on for a long time, in short, communications is at the core of society, better communication systems, programs, plans, will benefit many.

Fortunately there is a wealth of literature that can help people considering applying rigorous Design Thinking to Communications Planning. This month Wallpaper magazine invited the legendary Dieter Rams to edit his own 20-page section of the magazine [plus one of the three covers], where among other things, the designer offers “ten simple statements” that capture the philosophy that influences his work.

The following is an exercise that attempts to apply those principles to Communications Planning as a way to illustrate the tremendous possibility of interdisciplinary thinking. As the “product” of Communications Planning is communications itself, feel free to substitute “product” for campaign, program, ad, poster, website, and the like.

ONE: “Good design is innovative.” – Rams explains that copying existing product forms or creating novelty for novelty’s sake won’t do it. Perhaps the best way to stimulate innovation from the beginning is by tackling every communications project in its own unique manner, eliminating overused processes and documents that lead to familiar territories.

TWO: “Good design makes a product useful.” – The use of any piece of communication results in value for people interacting with it. Value can exist in multiple forms (information, entertainment, connectivity, etc.) and is intimately linked to a particular context.

THREE: “Good design is aesthetic.” – Richard Lanham has an entire book on the subject, in essence, the Attention Economy demands communications that are able to seamlessly navigate between Substance and Style, which are not only inseparable but interchangeable given the right context.

FOUR: “Good design helps a product to be understood.” – Just avoid having to explain whatever is that you are trying to communicate; if the communication creates more questions than answers, then it needs to be reinvented from scratch.

FIVE: “Good design is unobtrusive.” This statement will probably spark a few discussions around interception versus interruption. Mau’s book starts with a clever line: “…design is invisible. Until it fails.” It seems counterintuitive that a communications campaign should be unobtrusive but it all boils down to making communication that is “useful” and that negotiates a proper “aesthetic” balance.

SIX: “Good design is honest.” Don’t lie or use false claims and avoid being pretentious, that simple.

SEVEN: “Good design is durable.” Rams adds that “Waste must no longer be tolerated.” This principle lives at the core of great product design and clearly opposes the “waste-producing” nature of certain areas of our modern economy. Waste in communications is easy to spot and comes in many shapes: Repetition to the point of saturation, meaningless messages, faddish use of media channels, pointless executions…

EIGHT: “Good design is consistent to the last detail.” The application of messages to different channels without considering the functional nature of the medium often leads to deep inconsistencies that radically affect what we are trying to say. Video pre-roll ads are the perfect example.

NINE: “Good design is concerned with the environment.” Rams is concerned with nature as well as with “visual pollution” and other undesirables that affect a broader definition of environment. In the case of communications, we might want to consider the “social environment,” which might lead to socially-responsible communications. Think of the old British motto: “Unwelcome means not working.”

TEN: “Good design is as little design as possible.” Let me refer you again to Maeda’s work on simplicity.

Timeless design...

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The folks from IDEO contributed with GOOD magazine first anniversary issue’s graphic statement with two images that help us visualize, not only the spirit of the magazine’s main feature [and its urgency], but also at least part of the essence of Bruce Mau and the Institute without Boundaries’ Massive Change premise, which challenges our preconceptions about design by reminding us that “…it is not about the world of design; but about the design of the world.”

The article in question celebrates the transition of design from a noun to a verb, automatically expanding its scope: “Beyond improving the living rooms of those for whom Design is already within reach, design will improve the lives of every person on Earth.” Crazy but possible, as Massive Change suggests through revisiting old and new disciplines, re-framing [or un-framing] them within the paradigm of economies awaiting for design solutions.

Design as a vehicle for change. Dramatic, massive, even elegant change.

Take Information Technology [IT] as an example; viewed through the lens of "Information Economies," analysts can appreciate a different set of mechanics as well as a variety of new roles for their actors: Geeks writing code suddenly become lawmakers as Stanford’s Lawrence Lessig explains in an interview published in Mau’s book: “In implementing and choosing the architectures that will define cyberspace, you’re implementing and choosing certain architectures to enable or disable values. So you’re making political choices. What’s troubling is when these political choices are made by entities that aren’t responsible publicly; we then begin to worry about the extent to which this kind of private lawmaking defeat public values.”

Design can have a deep impact on Information Economies simply by helping us better understand the complexities of a world that literally speaks its own language. The development of a global interface that makes understanding and interacting with the world of IT accessible to the majority is essential to the future of democracy in an information-driven society.

The case of IT as one of the many realms that fit within Information Economies is probably a bit more obvious than some of the others touched by Massive Change [and by GOOD’s feature which introduces a simple, yet thought-provoking lingo to review design], anything from Urban Economies to Living Economies, or Image Economies to Military Economies, can indeed be influenced by the good thinking that lives at the core of Design.

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A previous post about Brazilian TV series City of Men was partly inspired by an article that I wrote back in 2004 about violence in Latin American cinema. The idea was to discuss the mythology of violence [true lowbrow semiotics] as well as some of its main drivers through reviewing three great contemporary films: Cidade de Deus [City of God], Huelepega [Glue Sniffer], and La Virgen de los Sicarios [Our Lady of the Assassins].

The three films dealt with violence in some of the most dangerous cities of the region: Caracas, Medellin, and Rio de Janeiro. Despite differences in language and culture, these cities share a few traits [from topography since the three are valleys with Favelas dominating the mountains, to their citizens' love for well-known brands] that make the comparison relevant, these similarities become evident when analyzing popular culture in general and these films in specific. The prevalence of this unfortunate circumstance position this analysis in a more significant context today than three years ago.

Here is the link to the article; it might be useful for people studying the subject matter. If you are interested in a deeper examination check out this 2006 Spiegel article which offers interesting insights on the situation.

An ever-growing Caracas’ Favela. Picture grabbed from Google Earth.

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Celebrate Spring. Vive La Fête-inspired radio station.

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Powered by Thinkmap's Visual Thesaurus.

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Jean Baudrillard contributed to the literature around consumption and its actors in a unique manner, his approach was more related to the object and its mythology than to the politics and ideology that provides context to consumer society. The Economist referred to him as a philosopher of consumerism, denoting his importance in a world that is in part sustained by people in their role as consumers. This week’s obituary in the magazine is devoted to the philosopher and there is one paragraph that captures an essential insight that defines him in many ways:

“…in his world, both the liberal and the communist narratives of history had collapsed. ´The end of history’ was no longer universal capitalism and democracy or the victory of the proletariat. It was summed up for Mr. Baudrillard by a lone man jogging, obvious to his surroundings, hearing only the music of his own sound-system and aware only of the statements he himself was making: health, fashion, endurance. He was running straight ahead, but with no end in view.”

As an insider and even a symbol of postmodernism, Baudrillard was probably too aware of the unnecessary baggage that came with any side of the political spectrum, he wasn’t a philosopher of the left precisely because the left was incompatible with his object of analysis: it was and still is too easy to produce a critique of consumerism that is aligned with the moral values of the left. Such a task would have been far from an intellectual challenge. On the other hand, by detaching himself from the dichotomy of good and evil [or left and right for that matter], he could provide an honest point of view with actual influence in modern life.

The “lone man jogging” has no vision of the future, perhaps because for him the future is happening now and it is more interesting to focus his energy on the kind of statement that he wants to make now, in the future. On the other hand, the statement is clear: we are what we do, but beyond that, we construct ourselves with the tools available on today’s consumer society that usually manifest themselves in a complex system of products, services, and brands, all powered by media.

Right at the center of this system is advertising, and Baudrillard certainly understood its inner mechanisms. In an essay published in 1970 titled La Societé de consommation, available in English here under the title Mass Media Culture, he explained that advertising, beyond the true and the false had to work by eliminating “meaning and proof… inducing tautological repetition,” which was then validated by the public through the act of purchasing.

What Baudrillard meant is that advertising’s technique is rooted in a message house [borrowing the term from PR] in which its message narcissistically focuses on the product it advertises to the point that it becomes a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” which relies on a “circular argument.” At the end advertising worked through repetition: “It is thus repetition itself that everywhere ensures effective causality.” Let’s keep in mind that almost all of his work was produced at the peak of the success [even control] of traditional mass media, and this had an intrinsic effect on his views of advertising and popular culture in general.

Almost three decades later mass media is no longer limited by the traditional players and a seemingly unlimited number of options are available to society at large in most western countries. This changes the rules of the game for advertising, and probably makes Baudrillard’s point even more relevant today than in 1970 because advertising no longer can survive on the basis of a persuasive monologue about itself and much less betting on repetition as essential to its success. Today, advertising needs to do exactly the opposite: open itself to a dialogue in the context of the brand but supported on a real viewpoint while assuming that there is only one opportunity to establish a relationship with its audience.

Revisiting the work of such an extraordinary thinker should not only be a pleasure but also a matter of life and death in today’s troubled communications industry. By devoting an entire career to develop a philosophical system surrounding signs, objects, and symbolic acts, Jean Baudrillard left us with a rich toolbox packed with intellectual gear ready to tackle today’s challenges with the substance needed to make any real impact.

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Umberto Eco usually dismissed the term “mass culture” as too broad and vague to mean anything at all. In a series of essays published in the early 60’s and titled “Apocalittici e Integrati,” Eco recognized that the generic ambiguity of mass culture is in part responsible for the radical debate about its value and effects in society, leading to the development of two opposed mindsets: the apocalyptic and the integrated [my translation, not sure is accurate].

Probably the best way to understand each side of the debate is through their manifestation in the media. The apocalyptic approach resides in texts about mass culture, as opposed to the integrated, which emerges from the texts produced by mass culture. This dichotomy led to the series of essays on media, popular culture, and modern society that today deserve a second look in the context of a very different landscape that might have an amplifying effect on the apocalyptic and integrated.

The base of Eco’s view can’t be detached from the fact that in the 1960’s [and 70’s, 80’s, 90’s…] both sides of the equation were represented by members of an elite that controlled the means of production of mass culture, the attention of society, or both. The typical apocalyptic was embodied by professors, writers, journalists, and other intellectuals. The integrated was more involved in the process of actually creating mass culture in TV, radio, print, advertising, etc.

Both camps had in common one trait of the pre-digital era: access to filters. Prominent intellectuals could have their voice heard in certain media vehicles because their reputation ensured an audience. TV executives could essentially do whatever they wanted as long as it attracted viewers and advertisers.

What happens to apocalittici e integrati when the filters disappear?

As the line between consumers and producers blur and access to the media is not necessarily linked to influence, these two characters mutate into hyper-versions of themselves. The “culture” in mass culture seems to be reinventing itself by the “mass” which probably fuels the argument of the apocalyptic, perhaps transforming them into superapocaliptics at the same time that makes the point of view of its nemesis not only stronger but also faceless and hence harder to aim at.

Here is a link to Rocco Capozzi’s essay on Eco and Mass culture, which deals with interesting questions on a subject that seems to be more relevant today than almost five decades ago.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find the book in English, perhaps the full series of essays published in the book titled “Apocalittici e Integrati” is only available in Italian and Spanish, let us know if you find the English-language version, this is certainly a reading that is worth the effort.

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If you haven’t followed the latest discussion about Second Life [SL] you can thank Henry Jenkins for his clear summary and remarkable contribution in his blog. Probably the most important trait of the conversation is that it took the debate about SL outside of SL and into the realm of virtual worlds or multiverses [term coined by Neal Stephenson]. What might be surprising is that in the discussions, the multiverse is isolated from its interactions with other media, and in the process the debate left out MTV’s Virtual Hills and Laguna Beach, which can offer some answers to the key questions asked during the conversation.

It is impossible to make any accurate predictions about the evolution of multiverses as isolated communication channels; however, it can be feasible to think of them as extensions and parts of more complex multimedia experiences like the one that MTV is developing. The size of the audience is completely irrelevant at this point and, as the focus of discussion, it pales in the light of all the cultural happenings that are emerging around these spaces.

Some brands like Cingular, Secret [P&G], and Pepsi already began experimenting in the Virtual Laguna Beach, which according to MTV already has an audience of 300,000 users. The experimentation that is happening throughout the few multiverses available can be interpreted as an inexpensive way of participating in the conversation with their users at the same time that it helps professionals in the whole spectrum of communications gather valuable [qualitative] learnings about people’s interaction with the virtual persona of [mostly] well-known brands.

It is very likely that no multiverse will ever get the amount of users that some of the pundits questioned in the discussion [again, for details go here], but if we think about it, that might be the equivalent of expecting that a single website would capitalize all the traffic on the internet cannibalizing all other players. After all, the internet is likely to remain the platform that will support most multiverses in the foreseeable future, and we could expect that more virtual worlds will join the landscape as tastes and mindsets will group and regroup users according to their interests. It is possible to consider a future in which thousands of multiverses coexist as support to real-world experiences that can vary from TV shows like the MTV example to an actual representation of the Real Estate market [imagine going shopping for your next condo in a 3D Century 21 multiverse].

Coming back to the present, it can be useful to take a look at the multiple uses of the virtual world by the people that actually live the experience. This is essential to evaluate [beyond the numbers] whether or not these spaces offer a truly engaging medium to its users. While it is true that some of it reflects the dark early beginnings of the web [tons of porn, gambling, etc], there are several users remixing the content, byproduct, and even the original purpose of the multiverse and bringing their own experiences into more “traditional” venues, here are a few examples:

Another interesting manifestation of community engagement can be found at the heart of the business community in SL through BMW’s Munich Express [Achim Muellers, Head of Brand Relations and Cooperation] conversation with a crew from Second Life Business Communicators Group. The conversation was rather deep and happened in-world on January, for a complete transcript visit the group’s site.

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Beirut-inspired radio station. Enjoy.

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Author Walter Kirn shared his thoughts on ubiquitous advertising in a must-read piece published in yesterday’s New York Times magazine. His account articulates the result of a dangerous practice in the marketing and communications industry that has been lately labeled as 360o marketing, in which brands surround people with messages across a variety of media channels. The more the merrier.

The problem with this kind of marketing is that, as Kirn suggests, it reflects a myopic vision of communications in which all impressions are created equal. The truth might be closer to the opposite, in these days every brand message must consider its context, which by the way, is not exclusively defined by the medium as it probably was a couple of decades ago.

The UK-based Centre for Integrated Marketing used an enlightening phrase (in some paper that I don’t remember now) to summarize the issue: “Unwelcome means not working.” It doesn’t matter how clever the ad is, the message won’t be properly digested if the person at the other end feels invaded. The intended meaning will be lost and replaced by negative feelings in most cases. At the end all impressions are not equal, some are extremely positive and create long-lasting relationships, some might be neutral and go unnoticed, and some are just unwelcome and extract life out of your brand.

Here are some examples provided by Time Magazine’s 2006 Person of the year and Advertising Age’s 2006 Agency of the Year.

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A wealth of evidence is turning mere futuristic scenarios into collective anxiety about the future of television. The long-time king and queen of media is going through a process of reinvention that has the potential of messing up badly with its current economics, which hence justify in big part all the confusion and mixed predictions about its future.

A quick scan over traditional media in the past few days can confirm the intensification of the debate; ADWEEK speculates whether or not “New Nielsen data could lead to chaotic upfront,” referring to the controversial commercial ratings data, which could provide some light on whether or not people are actually recalling advertising from watching it live or via pre-recorded DVR sessions.

FORTUNE magazine’s Geoff Colvin published a piece titled “TV is dying? Long live TV!” that deals with the fact that America is watching more TV than ever, “despite (or because of) the Web,” which seems counterintuitive but can help us understand the latest wave of gadgets and platforms focused on enabling digital content on TV sets as well as TV content on other screens.

Irregardless of whether people watch more or less TV in more or less screens, we can’t detach the present state of television from a model that was developed when the concept of “media fragmentation” was completely foreign to society at large, leading to a rhythmic advertising-based model in which interruption was normal and accepted as part of the package. The model also created standards in which TV shows were symmetric in relation to the advertising pod. Every genre had a specific length and was broadcasted at the same time and under the same frequency.

This model is being reinvented in front of us enabled by the multiple screens and digital platforms that have transferred control back to the masses. Control of the means of production and control of content options, an explosive combination, dangerous but not lethal to traditional outlets in a world that is proving to be more about complementing than about substituting.

A great example of the new asymmetric model is referenced in a WIRED article titled “Must-Stream TV,” which reviews the ultra-local, grassroots internet sitcom The Burg. The article refers to the show and its model in the context of TV, which is interesting due to the fact that it is far from it. In that sense it acknowledges that its creators “aren’t trying to remake TV--they are trying to break into it.”

In more than one sense, The Burg is in fact remaking TV, or at least redefining the storytelling format of the sitcom [can we really disconnect the two?]. Compared with traditional TV shows, The Burg has clear differences that set it apart in interesting ways. Probably the most important is its asymmetric structure, in which no two episodes are equal. The typical episode can last anywhere from one minute to 16 minutes, and is uploaded without a predetermined frequency. This asymmetry is perhaps the key to fresh, entertaining content: free from the restrictions of mandatory length and frequency.

Although less unique than its asymmetric nature, another interesting feature of The Burg is its blog format, which allows for immediate participation from viewers which can potentially alter the course of the story or at least alter it within the subconscious mind of its producers, director, and actors, who most likely read viewer’s comments at one point or another.

At the end of the day whether TV survives or not is not as important as whether fresh thinking reinvents the nature of its somehow tired storytelling, opening up options beyond the traditional model in which creativity is not constrained by the format but rather leads it.

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Henry Jenkins opens his book Convergence Culture with a brief account of the events that brought the imagination of a high school student to the public eye in different mediatic contexts. “Bert is Evil” offers the perfect example to illustrate the mechanics of Jenkins’ convergence culture. By taking Sesame Street’s Bert out of his context and placing him in a bizarre world, its creator accidentally provided visual support to anti-American protesters far away from Bert’s home at the same time that a set of reactions from the media and Bert’s owners unchained. Jenkins then welcomes the reader to “convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.”

What follows is probably one of the most influential books in years to come, dissecting three essential concepts of modern media theory [media convergence, participatory culture, collective intelligence] and providing a framework to further advance the conversation surrounding contemporrary media channels [as he does almost daily in his blog as well as in the Convergence Culture Consortium weblog].

“Bert is Evil” is not only a great, radical example of convergence culture [which we will look at in detail at a later time]. It also provides an interesting platform to understand semiotics through the lens of Umberto Eco’s work, particularly through his Theory of the Lie, explained in the introduction of A Theory of Semiotics: “semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all.”

Keeping in mind that this is merely a grain of sand in the huge desert of Eco’s theory of semiotics, it nevertheless provides an interesting view of sings through which anyone can question and challenge the assumptions and preconceptions around them. In this specific case, we could always ask ourselves who is lying when it comes to Bert’s intentions. Is he really good or evil? The process of answering this and similar questions has the potential to unlock the semiotician that lives within us.

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It is evident that most of the Airline industry (and its agencies) could benefit from the wisdom of parody. After all, parody has been a powerful genre to uncover that common knowledge that oftentimes gets dismissed as unimportant, remember Borat? In the words of Umberto Eco, parody, “if it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile –and without a blush– in steadfast, virile seriousness.”

Eco’s parody has indeed been taken seriously by a wide variety of professionals, from architects to anthropologists as he explains in the preface of How to Travel with a Salmon: “Parisian friends from Transcultura, an organization that imports African and Asian anthropologists to study European cities, say that their program was inspired by my ‘Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society,’ in which Melanesian anthropologists analyzed the primitive Milanese by sophisticated phenomenological parameters.”

Going back to the Airline industry and inspired by a recent international trip, one wonders why so many of their resources are focused on advertising as opposed to solving structural issues (i.e. mediocre meals). Perhaps they need a different type of advice similar to Naked Communications' recommendation to Boots Pharmacy which led them to improve their in-store experience as opposed to create more TV spots (see a brief summary within a Fast Company article here).

In any case, the frustration that surrounds airplane meals have been documented for decades and Umberto Eco's Diario Minimo offered an insightful review in its article How to Eat in a Flight, published in the above-mentioned second compilation titled How to Travel with a Salmon.

Here is an excerpt from How to Eat in a Flight, written at least two decades ago. It drives home the point with amazing clarity:

“…a typical in-flight menu comprises some long-cooked meat smothered in brown gravy, generous portion of tomato, vegetables finely chopped and marinated in whine, rice, and peas with sauce. Peas are notoriously elusive –not even the greatest chefs can produce petits fois farcis– especially if, deterring to the insistence of Miss Maners, the consumer is determined to eat the peas with his fork rather than the more practical spoon. Don’t tell me that the Chinese are worse off. I can assure you it is easier to grip a pea with chopsticks than to pierce it with a fork. It is also pointless to rebut that the fork is used to collect the peas, not to pierce them, because forks are designed for the sole purpose of dropping the peas they pretend to collect.

Furthermore, peas in flight are dully served only when there is turbulence and the captain turns on the “fasten seat belts” sign. As a result of this complex ergonomic calculation, the peas have only two alternatives: either they roll down your shirtfront or they fall on your fly.

As the ancient fabulists taught us, to prevent a fox from drinking out of a glass, the glass must be tall and slim. Glasses on planes are short, squat, rather basin-like. Obviously, any liquid will spill, obeying the laws of physics, even when there is no turbulence. The bread is not a French baguette, which you have to tear with your teeth even when it’s fresh, but rather a special friable roll, which, the moment is grasped, explodes in a cloud of fine powder. Thanks to the Lavoisier principle this powder vanishes only in appearance: on debarking, you will find that it has all accumulated under your behind, managing to stain even the seat of your trousers. The desert tends to the meringue genre, and its fragments mix with the bread, or else it dribbles over the fingers immediately, when the napkin is already steeped in tomato sauce and hence unusable.

True, you still have the perfumed towelette: but this cannot be distinguished from the little envelopes of salt, pepper, and sugar, and so, after you have put the sugar in the salad, the towelettte has already ended in the coffee, which is served boiling hot and in a heat-conducting cup filled with brim, so that it may readily slip from your seared fingers and blend with the gravy that has now congealed around your waist…

…why, then, in first class, where space is ample, do they serve compact foods, like Russian caviar or buttered slices of toast, or smoked salmon or lobsters chunks with a drop of oil and lemon? Is it perhaps because in the films of Luchino Visconti, when the Nazi aristocrats say “shoot him,” they pop a single, compact grape into their mouth?”

Posted by camilo at 07:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The beginning of 2007 is already suggesting that we are getting closer to accept comics as a serious and powerful communications channel. On the second day of the year, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Holy Heroes of Indian Lore. Batman!” which explains at length new ventures by Virgin Comics.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is taking an interesting approach to develop stories on comics, loosely based on traditional Indian mythologies and with preconceived cross-media extensions (mostly film). A bold approach includes recruiting the talent of two gifted film directors (John Woo and Guy Ritchie) to develop some of the stories, a move that will certainly raise the profile of the medium.

Also on the first week of January, The Economist published a short note referring to Philippe Cohen, Richard Malka, and Riss’ “La Face Karchée de Sarkozy;” the newest iteration of the political comic book in France (a country with a rich tradition with the medium). The book has also been at the center of a BBC article, discussed in several blogs, and even turned into amateur videos.

The recent success of Burger King’s Xbox arcade game series, with over 2 million copies sold at the end of 2006 (in just a few weeks), can’t be detached from pop culture’s increased appetite for comics. Since the beginning of the history of video games, designers have openly acknowledged the huge influence of comics in general and Japanese manga in specific on the video game medium. Chris Kohler documented this influence in multiple interviews with Japanese game designers; a great example comes from Nintendo’s Shigueru Miyamoto: “Thinking back, I would say that although it wasn’t done consciously, I ended up designing Donkey Kong like a traditional Japanese four-panel manga comic strip. That way of telling a story in four distinct parts seemed natural to me…”

Why is this medium so important? No one better to answer than Scott McCloud, who 14 years ago made a great push to liberate comics from its paradigm through his book “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.” Invisible because the mechanics of the medium include a great deal of interaction among the creator, channel, and reader that results in understanding beyond what is on paper. The visual language of comics lends itself to become a thought starter in the mind of the reader who often must complete the picture in her mind (in both, the literal and abstract sense). This exercise, known as closure, empowers comics with a unique and special faculty.

Invisible also because comics are created literally from nothing: ideas, pen, and paper. The medium of comics is as democratic as it is powerful, and the web as well as other internet-based platforms like Linden Lab’s Second Life will definitively play an important role in disseminating and offering new tools to artists and anyone with a vision.

We should welcome these developments because they will contribute to equalize tomorrow’s conversation while making us smarter in the process.

Images from Virgin Comics.

Posted by camilo at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Pay attention to the conversation about the present and future of the marketing and communications industry and you will enter a literal storm of ideas. Change is the premise, what worked in the previous decade is out today, as McLuhan said, “if it works, it’s obsolete.”

Pay closer attention and you will note that some of the new ideas begin to resemble the past. Just like fashion seems to be cyclical (e.g. skinny pants in the year 2006), marketing and communications might be secretly entering an age of reconciliation with some of the ideas that prevailed in its recent past. Russell Davies wrote about it last week, referring to the similarities between marketing 1.0 and marketing 2.0 and pointing out to a refreshing piece of research from Dr. Robert Heath that seems to be driving the discussion in a different direction (3.0 maybe?), focused more on the delivery of the message than on the message itself: “In advertising, it appears to be the case that it’s not what you say, but the way that you say it that gets results.” Or should we rather say: The medium is the message.

On the same day of Russell’s post, Scott Bedbury (former marketing executive from Starbucks, Nike – also author of A New Brand World), gave a keynote speech at Yahoo!’s “Engaging Advocates Through Search and Social Media” conference at The New York Public Library. The focus: “Achieving Brand Leadership in the 21st Century,” which ironically reinforced old-school brand-focused thinking peppered with new ideas in the brand advocate arena.

Bedbury’s lesson can be summarized in the view that remarkable brands are the result of “relevancy, creativity, and emotional connection.” His recipe to achieve this “remarkable” status requires a mix of brand connection with something “timeless and meaningful,” rooted in a great product or service that together with the brand represent a set of “values and promises” compatible with the audience’s heart. Emotional connection at its best, which ratifies at some extent Heath’s findings but from a different angle related to what you say rather than how you say it.

Emotion seems to be at the core of most schools of thought that seek a viable alternative to business-as-usual in the marketing and communications industry of the present. Emphasis on what you say rather than on how you say it or the contrary might not make a lot of sense when considering that the emotional connection that we are looking for is constrained by the attention economy in which what we say must be welcomed by means of actual, tangible value.

The logic of emotional connection makes sense and is valid as long as its mechanism includes something of value for the people at the other end. This is amplifying the meaning of (corporate) social responsibility to a whole new level, driven by the forces of the market, specifically by people with (media) options. Recognizing that the attention of any individual has value is probably a good place to begin revisiting all the good old thinking about emotions, regardless of whether you focus on the medium, the message, or both (can we actually separate them?).

Here is Nike’s “Revolution” spot which Mr. Bedbury used as an example of a piece of creative that contributed to Nike’s Air Max enormous success almost a decade ago. Nine years later Nike's revolution feels very different: It's Ipod-compatible.

Posted by camilo at 06:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It comes as an unfortunate surprise to learn that there is so little information about José Antonio Marina in English. Being one of the leading voices on the study of intelligence, the Spaniard philosopher definitively (and urgently) needs more attention in the English-speaking world. Paraphrasing the author, understanding human intelligence will determine what we know about ourselves which is essential to understand what we really are. In modern society, this question is central to grasp the mechanics of the individual and collective intelligence enabled by digital technology.

Marina’s first two books (which deserved multiple European awards) were dedicated to intelligence in its creative form. Teoría de la Inteligencia Creadora (the second one), displays a thorough scientific analysis through a delightful prose, demonstrating right and left brain thinking in equal parts. The book is a mélange of neurology, artificial intelligence, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy, which blend to produce a theory that describes the creative process in a dense but entertaining manner, using two powerful examples: sports and arts.

An important part of the argument is the exploration of language as essential to understand and create meaning. Marina elaborates on the school of thought that considers language to be our prison due to the fact that we can only think what language allows us to think; adding that language is more like a halt which provides support in the production of meaning. Language is then where human beings unify information composed of images, values, voices, etc., and unload it into words.

In the context of our digital society, understanding our creative intelligence and the role of language is essential to come to terms with the real impact of the human-computer relationship and the implications to the great majority of people without access to this digital world.

The graphic user interface (GUI), is that element of modern computing that facilitates the dialogue between the human mind and the operations performed by the machine. It has evolved to a point that it blends seamlessly with the final result, rendering several layers of programming and mathematics invisible to us. The modern GUI has been feeding from language and its metaphors in the quest to become easier, more intuitive. Today the GUI could very well be considered some sort of language of its own, renovating and extending our “prison” and therefore allowing us to refine our own thoughts.

An attempt to digest Marina’s theories on human intelligence as part of the dialogue around the digital divide (the division between those with access to computers and the internet versus those without it), can potentially lead to uncover another dimension of the problem: A dimension that looks way beyond the economic, educational, and social aspects into a deeper division in the way we process information.

More about this subject soon.

Posted by camilo at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Former MIT president Jerome Wiesner tells a story about (Vladimir) Zworykin’s visiting him one Saturday at the White House when Wiesner was JFK’s science advisor (and close friend). He asked Zworykin if he had ever met the president. As Zworykin had not, Wiesner took him across the hall to meet JFK. Wiesner introduced his visitor to the president as ‘the man who got you elected.’ Startled, JFK asked, ‘How is that?’ Wiesner explained, “This is the man who invented television.’ JFK replied how that was a terrific and important thing to have done. Zworykin wryly commented, ‘Have you seen television recently?’”

The quote belongs to Nicolas Negroponte’s Being Digital; sadly the same conversation could have happened yesterday. TV hasn’t improved that much in the forty years that followed. Back in 1995 Negroponte predicted that “being digital will change the nature of mass media from a process of pushing bits at people to one of allowing people (or their computers) to pull at them,” declaring an upcoming revolution that will evolve our “concept of media” from the filters that reduce content to “a collection of top stories or best-sellers” to a model of “narrowcasting” in which “the information industry will become more of a boutique business.” Sounds familiar?

Eleven years ago Negroponte forecasted his own version of what is known today as The Long Tail, in which society, empowered by the digital ecosystem, creates a marketplace that balances the overwhelming power of the “hit culture.”

In 2006 people are not only driving the development of a vast marketplace for products, services, and content, but are also collaborating (most of the time anonymously) to develop and remix information, much like Pierre Levy’s concept of the Social Megamind (see more details in an earlier post).

In the age of collective intelligence and digital collaboration it is almost impossible to keep this trend limited to the web. According to a Royal Magazine article, Current TV is reinventing how (television) content is developed by creating a system of participation that is opening the door for what the station calls “viewer created content.” Anyone can submit her own show to Current TV’s website where a community of viewers decides whether or not the material should be broadcasted. The system creates content that ends up being the final product of a collective effort, boosting creativity and leveraging cross-media synergies in a way that really adds value to public life by making a dramatic change in the tired TV landscape.

Tune in and judge for yourself.

Posted by camilo at 08:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)